Posts Made By: Brien Stratton

I have not been talking with you in the last week about God, to bring honour to myself.

I owe all I know, and my life to :

Jehovah God,

and His son, Jesus Christ.

I also belong to a wonderful organization, called Jehovah's Witnesses. They have taught me most of what I know. I think they have the truth. Please be kind to them, they are good people, who are trying to help people get reconciled with God.

I feel that I have said what I needed to say here, and I have heard your positions too. I will be leaving this forum for now. I honestly don't have the time to keep this discussion up. My work is suffering, and things are not getting done here. Enjoy your new forum. I learnt a lot of things from all of you. Thank you for a great discussion.

I will leave with a passage from the good book, near the very end of the Bible:

'" And the spirit and the bride keep on saying: "Come!" And let anyone hearing say: "Come! And let anyone thirsting come; let anyone that wishes take life's water free."'

" He that bears witness of these things says, 'Yes; I am coming quickly.'"

" Amen! Come, Lord Jesus."

May the undeserved kindness of the Lord Jesus Christ be with the holy ones."'

Revelation 22:17,20,21

The apostle John, prisoner on the Island of Patmos, for speaking about God, and bearing witness to Jesus, 96 C.E.

Hello group, thanks for your kind words. I did not realize you were interested in my posts. Sometimes, I think people are thinking I am a know it all. I just wanted to share the info I received.

I analyzed my last two posts and they do seem a tad self righteous, and a bit of a cop out. See, I can analyze myself too. Anyways, you know what my background is.

I will be honest to you, the last week has been very stressful, work has been difficult. I am thinking about moving, so I have a lot on my plate. Also, trying to compose precise answers to give you has been affecting me. I have had to stretch my mind, and spirit in a million directions, to answer your questions. I have had trouble sleeping the last few nights. Sometimes I have prayed to God to help me compose these answers. (Must mean I am inspired, hehehhe). I feel a weighty responsibility to tell you things from the word of God , knowing the effect it can have on someone's spiritual beliefs.

Maybe ,as someone said I could post less frequently. or pass on some questions that others could easily answer. There is a lot of issues left to discuss, and topics we can attempt to come to the "truth" about.

Brien

Evolutionists, and some liberal Christians have a problem with the Adam and Eve story, it is too perfect according to them.

Then, if we believe in evolution, how did man begin? Did 10 different people in different parts of the globe all of sudden pop out of the ground, and kazoom man started? Not likely, since all races have the same DNA, according to recent studies by geneticists. Which points to an original progenitor. I know of course, according to evolutionary theory, that the different forms of humanoids developed into what we have today. I am talking though about the "final form" of humanoid that looks like us today.

So, if we believe in evolution, there would probably have to have been a single "final form" man that developed first, or at most a couple of humans, and so we arrive at the same place as Genesis. The Adam and Eve account is not that strange. Evolution would have had to have their "Adam and Eve" too.

Brien

Looks like the tower of Babel again. I said the same thing two nights ago.

Brien

The sudden appearance of animal structural types in the Cambrian period, and the lack of new types since 500 million years since the Cambrian is discussed in the book -What Evolution is, (2001), by Ernst Mayr, who is the professor Emeritus in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. he wrote on page 279:

" How can we explain the two great puzzles in the phylogeny of animals?

The first puzzle is the sudden appearance of 60 to 80 different structural tyes ( body plans) of animals in the early Cambrian, and the second puzzle is why no major new types originated in the 500 million years since the Cambrian.

It is now clear that the seemingly sudden origin ( within 10-20 million years) since the Cambrian ( beginning 544 million years ago) is an artifact of preservation. By use of the molecular clock, the origin of the animal types can be placed at about 670 million years ago, but the animals living between 670 and 544 million years ago are not preserved as fossils because they were very small and without skeletons.

The reason why no major new types originated in the ensuing 500 million years is more complex and only partly understood. However, molecular geneticics has led to an explanatory suggestion. Development is tightly controlled in the now living organisms by very precise "working teams" of regulatory genes. In the Precambrian, there were apparently only a few such genes, which did not control development as tightly as later on. This allowed a frequent occurrence of rapid major restructuring of the structural types. By the end of the Cambrian, the dominance of these regulatory genes had been fully established and the origin of completely new structural types had become difficult, if not impossible. One must always remember that the changes prior to the Cambrian did not occur suddenly, but over a period of several hundred million years , even though not documented in the fossil record."

Brien

Luke's gospel account shows that an evildoer, being executed alongside Jesus Christ, spoke words in Jesus' defence and requested that Jesus remember him when he 'got into his kingdom'. Jesus' reply was : " Truly I tell you today, You will be with me in Paradise." (Luke 23:39-43- New World Translation)

The punctuation shown in the rendering of these words must, of course, depend on the translator's understanding of the sense of Jesus's words, since no punctuation was used in the original Greek text. Punctuation in the modern style did not become common until about the ninth century C.E. Whereas many translations place a comma before the word "today" and thereby give the impression that the evildoer entered Paradise that same day, there is nothing in the rest of the scriptures to support this. Jesus himself was dead and in the tomb until the third day and was then reurrected as the "firstfruits" of the resurrection. (Acts 10:40, 1 Corinthians 15:20 ,Colossians 1:18). He ascended to heaven 40 days later. ( John 20:17, Acts 1:1-3,9)

The evidence is, therefore, that Jesus' use of the word "today" was not to give the time of the evildoer's being in Paradise but, rather, to call attention to the time in which the promise was being made and during which the evildoer had shown a measure of faith in Jesus. It was a day when Jesus had been rejected and condemned by the highest-ranking religious leaders of his own people and was therefore sentenced to die by Roman authority. He had become an object of scorn and ridicule. So the wrongdoer alongside him had shown a notable quality and commendable heart attitude in not going along with the crowd, but, rather, speaking out in Jesus' behalf and expressing belief in his coming Kingship. Recognizing that the emphasis is correctly placed on the time of the promise's being made rather than on the time of its fulfillment, other translations, such as those in English by Rotherham and Lamsa, those in German by Reinhardt and W. Michaelis, as well as the Curetonian Syriac of the 5th century, rendered the text in a form similar to the reading of the New World Translation , quoted above. -from the book- Insight From the Scriptures.

As to the identification of the Paradise of which Jesus spoke, it is clearly not synonymous with the heavenly Kingdom of Christ. Earlier that day entry into that heavenly kingdom had been held out as a prospect for Jesus' faithful disciples but on the basis of their having 'stuck with with him in his trials', something the evildoer had never done, his dying on a stake alongside Jesus being purely for his own criminal acts. ( Luke 22:22-28-30; 23: 40,41). The evildoer obviously had not been " born again", of water and spirit, which Jesus showed was a prerequisite to entry into the Kingdom of the heavens. (John 3:3-6).

The paradise familiar to the Jewish criminal to whom Jesus spoke was the earthly Paradise described in the first book of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Paradise of Eden. That being so, Jesus' promise would reasonably point to a restoration of such earthly paradisaic condition. His promise to the wrongdoer would therefore give assured hope of a resurrection of such an unrighteous one to an opportunity to life in that restored Paradise. ( see Acts 24:15, Revelation 20:12,13,; 21:1-5; Matthew 6:10) -from the book -Insight on the Scriptures.

Brien

I will be writing 7 posts that will talk about the 7 Creative Days when God prepared the earth for man's habitation. I hope you find them interesting. Hopefully they will show, that the Genesis account is quite detailed, and is not the simplistic account many think it is. As we discussed before these days were not 24 hours in length, but could be thousands , or even millions of years long. Also the sun, earth, and universe had been created at an unidentified time period, long before, in the opening statement of Genesis 1:1 : "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

First Creative Day:

It seems that the earth had been established in orbit around the sun and was a globe covered with water before the six "days", or periods, of special creative works began. "There was darkness upon the surface of the watery deep." (Genesis 1:2). At that early point, something-perhaps a mixture of water vapor, other gases , and volcanic dust-must have prevented sunlight from reaching the surface of the earth. The Bible describes the first creative period this way: '" God proceeded to say:
" Let light come to be." Then there came to be light."' (Genesis 1:3)

This light was from the sun, but the sun itself could not be seen through the overcast. Hence, the light that reached earth was "light diffused". A swaddling band of cloud layers still enveloped the earth, preventing light from reaching its surface.

Also, what was started in one period did not have to be fully completed when the next period began. To illustrate, light gradually began to appear on the first "day", yet it was not until the fourth creative period that the sun, moon, stars could have been discerned. (Genesis 1:14-19)

Continued.....

Brien

Second Creative Day:

Before the Creator made dry land appear on the third creative "day", he lifted some of the waters. As a result, the earth was surrounded by a blanket of water vapor. The Creator could have employed natural processes to lift these waters and keep them aloft. These waters fell in the days of Noah. ( Genesis 1:6-8, 2 Peter 2:5; 3:5-6) . This historic event left an indelible mark on the human survivors and their descendants , as anthropologists confirm. We find this event reflected in flood accounts preserved by peoples earth wide.

The ancient record does not-and need not- describe the mechanisms used. Instead the Bible focuses on the expanse between the upper and surface waters. It calls this the heavens. Even people today use this term for the atmosphere where birds and airplanes fly. In due course, God filled this atmospheric heavens with a mix of gases vital for life.

Genesis 1:6-8 reads:

"' Let an expanse come to be in between the waters and let a dividing occur between the waters and the waters.' Then God proceeded to make the expanse and to make a division between the waters that should be beneath the expanse and the waters that should be above the expanse. And it came to be so. And God began to call the expanse Heaven."

To be continued.....

Brien

"' Let the waters under the heavens be brought together into one place and let the dry land appear.' And it came to be so. And God began calling the dry land Earth, but the bringing together of the waters be called Seas." (Genesis 1:9,10) As usual, the account does not describe how this was done. No doubt, tremendous earth movements would have been involved in the formation of land areas. Geologists would explain such major upheavals as catastrophism. But Genesis indicates direction and control by a Creator.

In the Biblical account where God is described as questioning Job about his knowledge of the earth, a variety of developments concerning earth's history are described: its measurements, its cloud masses, its seas and how their waves were limited by dry land -many things in general about the creation, spanning long periods of time. Among these things , comparing earth to a bulding, the Bible says that God asked Job: "Into what have its socket pedestals been sunk down, or who laid its cornerstone?" (Job 38:6)

Interestingly, like "socket pedestals", earth's crust is much thicker under continents and even more so under moutain ranges, pushing deep into the underlying mantle, like tree roots into soil. " The idea that mountains and continents had roots has been tested over and over again, and shown to be valid", says the book- Putnam's Gelogy. Oceanic crust is only about 5 miles thick, but continental roots go down about 20 miles and mountain roots penetrate about twice that far. And all earth's layers press inward upon earth's core from all directions, making it like a great "cornerstone" of support.

Whatever means were used to accomplish the raising up of dry land, the important point is: Both the Bible and science recognize it as one of the stages in the forming of the earth.

Third creative day continued.....

Brien